Irregular and sometimes life-threatening heart rhythms -- called arrhythmias -- are able to be treated thanks to electric jolts in defibrillators and pacemakers, but those jolts aren't completely without risk. Not only can they be painful, but in some instances they can even damage tissue.
And while most people would probably put up with a little pain if it means saving their lives, five biomedical engineers at Johns Hopkins and Stony Brook universities figured they'd work on improving the system to see if these devices would work just as well without the jolts of electricity.
Instead, they want to treat arrhythmia with light, the scientists said in an August 28 report in the journal Nature Communications.
